The second film in Leone's "Dollar" trilogy (THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE UGLY would follow) finds the Italian director in better form than in A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS. FOR A FEW DOLLARS MORE has better writing, superior production values, and more characters who aptly complement Eastwood's
stoic Man with No Name.
In this installment, the mysterious drifter is locked in combat with rival bounty hunter Colonel Mortimer (Van Cleef) to collect the reward for killing psychopathic bandit Indio (Volonte). At first, the men attempt to capture the crook separately, without success. The pair form an uneasy alliance,
and Mortimer eventually guns Indio down in a shootout as No Name watches from the sidelines. It turns out, though, that Mortimer is not interested in money after all.
By introducing the character of Mortimer, Leone is able to counterpoint Eastwood's cold, amoral gunslinger with a man who has a past and a purpose. A more human character with which the audience can more readily identify makes Eastwood's role all the more mythic. Once again, Morricone's music is
superbly appropriate, with each character's own theme (and one for the flashbacks too) bursting into this epic at just the right moment.
In FOR A FEW DOLLARS MORE, Leone's thematic concerns about the civilizing influence of the family and the hypocrisy of the Church are now richly in focus. His tone of self-parody and his portrait of an unrelenting landscape where men suddenly appear and vanish are all more detailed than before. We
are also given the sense that the Man with No Name has been somewhat humanized by his encounter with Mortimer, a suspicion that would be confirmed in the final chapter of the trilogy. leave a comment